In a keynote address at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition: Digital Platforms and Concentration conference, the US Department of Justice’s Assistant Attorney General said antitrust enforcers “should be open and receptive to empirical evidence that companies in digital markets may be engaging in predatory pricing or other exclusionary conduct to drive out competition and cause long-run harm to consumers” and said his own thinking on data has changed.
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Chapter 7 of our Digital Platforms and Concentration conference ebook looks at some critical junctures in the history of competition between Big Tech companies and explores how, even when regulators have detected anticompetitive behavior, the remedies they’ve imposed have done little to solve the problem.
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This week in political economy.
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Why has Facebook’s scandal not dented its earnings? How much are states and local governments giving to corporations in economic-development incentives? And did CFPB head Mick Mulvaney really say “the swampiest thing ever”?
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In Chapter 6 of our Digital Platforms and Concentration conference ebook, a research psychologist who, with an associate, discovered the search engine manipulation effect (SEME) in 2013—one of the largest behavioral effects ever identified—argues that Google’s search engine may have determined the outcomes of a quarter of the world’s elections in recent years.
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In Chapter 5 of the forthcoming Stigler Center ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, published in anticipation of the eponymous conference at Chicago Booth on April 19 and 20, ProMarket editor Guy Rolnik and coauthors give an overview of the challenges facing the regulators of tech giants today.
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What are the bases of the digital platforms’ power? In Chapter 3 of our Digital Platforms and Concentration ebook in advance of this month’s blockbuster antitrust conference at Chicago Booth, Lina M. Khan points to the gatekeeper power, leveraging power, and information exploitation power of America’s tech giants.
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What accounts for the difference in contemporary EU and US antitrust doctrine? Examined closely, says William E. Kovacic in Chapter 4 of our forthcoming Digital Platforms and Concentration ebook, the DNA of modern US antitrust doctrine is a double helix, with one strand coming from the Chicago School and a second strand from the modern Harvard school.
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The European Commission’s 2001 decision to stop GE’s acquisition of Honeywell might be the most famous of its several decisions to interfere in mergers of US companies, and has prompted some observers to accuse it of seeking to protect European firms from competition. So what do the data say on the subject?
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In Chapter 2 of the ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, forthcoming ahead of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference on April 19 and 20, Justus Haucap of Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf examines the distinctiveness of how Germany does antitrust for big tech, with specific looks at its current investigations of Google Shopping and Facebook and how useful data portability could really be.
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In this chapter from the forthcoming Stigler Center ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, published in anticipation of the eponymous conference at Chicago Booth on April 19 and 20, Ezrachi and Stucke consider how leading digital platforms and data-opolies distort the online environment for private gain at the expense of the common good.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Facebook early investor Roger McNamee talks about his efforts to get Facebook to fix its business model and the moment he realized the social media giant is unwilling to change.
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